Well, a little bit of history about the press revue. Initially, the press
review was born as a request from one of my customer, a little more than four
years ago. A this time, this revue was oriented towards its locally used
technology only, and was commented and discussed to sum things up appropriately
according to its own needs.

Since then, this revue was finally regularly published on this blog--some
months after I leaved this customer in fact--, but it now takes me some time to
collect and format, and was not really discussed anymore: it's just a
bunch of (I hope ;-)) interesting links, but without much of value as it stands
now. More, that information which are asynchronous by nature are not well
served when published once a month, when interesting news came at the beginning
of a month and is only released four weeks later through the press revue.

So, I decided to push these links more synchronously through my Twitter account, which feed this
need more appropriately I think. This way the information will flow more
regularly, and no need to wait for a bunch of them late each month. Please
Follow @_thnet to
subscribe to the new form of the press review :)

Last, I just want to say I will try my best to resurrect the old purpose of
this blog which is more about writing technical contents, better served using
this kind of media.

I hope these changes will fit your needs. Please let me know if you see any
problem with this move. Thank you.

Preparing for #OOW: DB12c, M6, In-memory, Clouds, Big Data... and IoT

It’s always difficult to fit the upcoming Oracle Open World topics, and all
its sessions in one title, even if "Simplifying IT. Enabling Business
Transformation." makes it clear on what Oracle is focusing on, I wanted to be
more specific on the "How". At least for those of you who attended Hot Chips
conference, some of the acronyms will be familiar to you, some may not (I will
come back to "IoT" later). For those of you attending, or those of you who will
get the sessions presentations once available online, here are few things that
you don't want to miss which will give you not only what Oracle R&D has
done for you since last year, but also what customers -like you- have
implemented thanks to the red-stack and its partners, being ISVs or SIs.

Misys Kondor+ runs best on SPARC T5

Misys is a leading financial software vendor, providing the broadest
portfolio of banking, treasury, trading and risk solutions available on the
market. At ISV Engineering, we have a long-standing collaboration with the
Kondor+ product line, that came from the Turaz acquisition (formerly part of
Thomson Reuters) and now part of the Misys Treasury & Capital Markets (TCM)
portfolio. Jean-Marc Jacquot, Senior Technical Consultant at Misys TCM, was
recently interviewed by ITplace.TV (in French language) about a recent IT
redesign of the Kondor+ installed base at a major French financial
institution.

FAQ2: Analyzing Large Volumes of nmon Data

I regularly get asked a question like: I have 4 months of data from 25
machines and have to develop a Capacity Planning model to size these LPARs on
to new machines but I am having problems with having so much data. What can you
recommend?

FAQ3: How can I Monitoring Shared Processor Pools longer term?

[...] The CPU Pool information is gathered (if switched on) at the HMC via
the service processor but extracting it and then using it to generate graphs or
spreadsheet data is extremely complex particularly if you have a complex set of
up to 64 CPU Pools!

Happy 10th Birthday, DTrace!

Ten years ago this morning — at 10:27a local time, to be exact — DTrace was
integrated. On the occasion of DTrace’s fifth birthday a half-decade ago, I
reflected on much of the drama of the final DTrace splashdown, but much has
happend in the DTrace community in the last five years; some highlights...

You won't find this in your phone: A 4GHz 12-core Power8 for badass
boxes

Hot Chips Big iron sales are still generating $6bn to $7bn a year for IBM -
which is enough to justify designing its own Power processors and building its
own wafer baker.

At the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University on Monday, some of the
chief architects behind the Power8 electronics were on hand to show off the
feeds and speeds of the next-generation motor for the company's Power Systems
lineup.

Advanced Network Monitoring Using Oracle Solaris 11 Tools

In this article, we will examine three use cases in order to demonstrate the
capability of Oracle Solaris 11 tools. The first use case will show how to
measure the network bandwidth between two systems. The second use case will
demonstrate how to observe network statistics on a specific TCP port, and the
last use case will demonstrate, by example, how to collect and display
historical statistics of network resource usage for a given date and time
range.

On 10th of September, Oracle announced its latest ZFS Storage Appliances, the
ZS3 Series, that enables customers to accelerate time to insight, while
extensive Oracle co-engineering improves operational efficiencies and reduces
data center costs through dynamic automation through the Oracle stack. As IT
skills converge, the ZS3 provides enterprises with the ability to respond to
application needs dynamically while reducing time-to-business benefits.

Solaris Random Number Generation

The following was originally written to assist some of our new hires in
learning about how our random number generators work and also to provide
context for some questions that were asked as part of the ongoing (at the time
of writing) FIPS 140-2 evaluation of the Solaris 11 Cryptographic
Framework.

How to determine why your AIX oslevel is downlevel (and a script to
help!)

To determine the oslevel on AIX, you can run the "oslevel -s"
command. However, what "oslevel -s" reports doesn't always show the
entire picture. The OS level reported will be the lowest level of
any installed AIX fileset on your server.

Amazon, Avere and Oracle Offer Up the Most Transformational Technologies at
VMworld 2013

The good news is that what Oracle had to share with me about its innovations
in storage went well beyond anything I could have possibly imagined and it was
certainly better than anything I was hearing on the VMworld show floor. In
short, what Oracle has done has brought together the best of what ZFS has to
offer and tied that together with the best of what of its Oracle databases have
to offer to deliver Oracle application performance that far outshines what
anyone else can even remotely hope to offer anytime in the near future.

Top Tips for Updating Solaris 11 Systems

We now have quite a bit of experience of IPS and Repositories under our
belt.

Feedback from customers has been extremely positive. I recently met a
customer with 1000+ Solaris servers who told me that with Solaris 10 it took
them 2 months to roll out a new patchset across their enterprise. With
Solaris 11, it takes 10 days. That really helps lower TCO.

GRTgaz new Information System on Oracle SuperCluster

This testimony from Mr Sébastien Flourac, Head of Strategy for GRTgaz IT,
concluded the last week SPARC Showcase event. Mr Flourac highlighted why he
selected an Oracle SuperCluster, Engineered Systems, over a more traditional
build it yourself approach, that he also studied.

Many announcements have been made today by Larry Ellison, during his opening
of Oracle OpenWorld. [...] On OpenWorld side, it was also very
impressive. More people this year are attending the event : 60 000 ! And in
terms of big numbers, we saw very impressive results of the new features and
products that have been announced today by Larry: Database 12c in-memory
option, M6-32 Big Memory Machine, M6-32 SuperCluster and Oracle Database
Backup, Logging, Recovery Appliance (yes, I am not joking, that's its real
product name !).

PureSystems Anyone?

IBM introduced the PureSystems in April 2012. It was a big deal and it still
is. IBM is certain this is the system to converge all systems, with
infrastructure in a box--PureFlex--as the solution to the huge business knot
caused by IT redundancies. Instead of each platform requiring its own
infrastructure, this is one infrastructure for all and all for one. In the past
year and a half, the successes have mostly piled up on the X86 side as a server
consolidation play, but IBM i shops are in this game, too.

Oracle's SPARC M6

Companies are awash in data. In fact, Science Daily reported that 90% of the
world's data was generated over the last two years. Capturing, integrating, and
analyzing massive amounts of data from both social media interactions and
traditional in-house systems demands a shift to in-memory processing.

With Oracle's new SPARC M6-32 systems, customers can now run entire
applications in memory. Based on the SPARC M6 12-core processor, these systems
have a staggering 32 terabytes of system memory and up to 384 processor cores
with 8-threads per core. The SPARC M6-32 provides twice the memory capacity of
IBM Power servers and delivers extreme in-memory compute performance for
large-scale, mission-critical workloads and databases. And it offers the
highest levels of system availability for core business applications.

Solaris General Session at Oracle Open World 2013

[...]
Here are some of the highlights of what's coming in the next release:

kernel zones: With kernel zones customers will have to option to run different
kernel patch levels across different zones while maintaining the simplicity of
zones management. We'll also be able to do live migration of kernel zones. All
of that across HW platforms, i.e. kernel zones will be available on both SPARC
as well as x86. Key benefits of kernel zones:

Low overhead (Lots of optimizations because we run Solaris on Solaris)

Unique security features: Ability to make them immutable by locking down
the root file system

READ_ME_FIRST: What Do I Do With All of Those SPARC Threads?

With an amazing 1,536 threads in an Oracle M5-32 system, the number of
threads in a single system has never been so high. This offers a tremendous
processing capacity, but one may wonder how to make optimal use of all these
resources.

In this technical white paper, we explain how the heavily threaded Oracle T5
and M5 servers can be deployed to efficiently consolidate and manage workloads
using virtualization through Oracle Solaris Zones, Oracle VM Server for SPARC,
and Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center, as well as how to improve the
performance of a single application through multi-threading.

Linux Container (LXC) — Part 2: Working With Containers

Part 1 of this article series provided an overview about the Linux container
technology. This second part intends to give you an impression on how to work
with containers, by showing a few practical examples. These can be easily
followed and reproduced on an up to date Oracle Linux 6 system. For the first
steps, it is recommended to install Oracl Linux inside a virtual environment
like Oracle VM VirtualBox. Oracle provides a pre-installed and pre-configured
Oracle Linux 6 Virtualbox image for free download from the Oracle Technology
Network (OTN).

The series also includes recommendations for the correct design of network
infrastructure for VMware cluster and multi-pool configurations, as well as the
recommended data layout for virtual machines. In addition, the series
demonstrates the use of VMware linked clone technology with Oracle ZFS Storage
Appliance.

IBM Opens POWER Technology for Development

IBM, along with Google, Mellanox, NVIDIA and Tyan, has announced that it
will form a new consortium called OpenPOWER. The OpenPOWER Consortium will
leverage IBM’s proven POWER processor to provide an open and flexible
development platform aimed at accelerating the rate of innovation for advanced,
next-generation data centers.

Back in time - or: zpool import -T

Sometimes you find out interesting stuff just by Google and trying something
out. Yesterday i've searched for some information for ZFS on FreeBSD (one the
OSes i keep in my OS zoo) and in the course of it, i found a mail on a FreeBSD
list talking about the command zpool import -T . -T? There is no -T option on
zpool import? Or is it just in FreeBSD?

mirroring progress in AIX

In the past, I posted this "snippet" as the solution to often asked question
– how much mirroring is done? Today, I had an opportunity to use it. Man, it
works like charm!!! Such a small thing but so much joy :-) Oh boy, I am
overdoing it for sure...

IBM Forms OpenPower Consortium, Breathes New Life Into Power

Back in July, I started what will eventually be a series of stories on what
IBM should be doing with its systems business. And like a bolt from the blue,
the company did something that I have been mulling for the past several months
in earnest and noodling for the past several years off and on. And what IBM has
done is to mimic the ARM collective and open up the intellectual property
surrounding its Power chips to help foster a broader ecosystem of users and
system makers.

IBM To FTC: Make Oracle Stop Running Those Mean Server Ads Please

Oracle is back in lukewarm water over a line of ads that say its own Sparc
and Exadata servers are between two and 20 times better than IBM's Power
Systems servers. This time, instead of getting another slap on the wrist from
an independent industry board that oversees advertising in the U.S, it could
get a slap on the wrist from the Federal Trade Commission itself. It's time for
IBM, which called Oracle "a serial offender," to take matters into its own
hands.

Exploring Installation Options and User Roles

Part 1 of a two-part series that describes how I installed Oracle Solaris 11
and explored its new packaging system and the way it handles roles, networking,
and services. This article focuses first on exploring Oracle Solaris 11 without
the need to install it, and then actually installing it on your system.

Re-installing the IBM PureFlex™ System and IBM Flex FSM

So you have broken the FSM in you IBM Flex or IBM PureFlex™ System, either
it won't power on any more, or its just failing to start. In my case after a
software update it wouldn't boot up correctly and some how the root user had
been corrupted, so this meant that I couldn't get access to the system. Below
I'll go through the steps I took to get the software re-installed from the
'recovery' section of the internal disk on the FSM node.

Less known Solaris 11.1 features: pfedit

It's a really nifty feature: Let's assume, you have a config file in your
system and you want to allow your junior fellow admin to edit it from time to
time, but don't want him to pass any further rights to him, because this
machine is too important.

Solaris 11.1 has an interesting feature to delegate the privilege to edit
just a file. The tool enabling this is called pfedit.

Memory Leak (and Growth) Flame Graphs

Your application memory usage is steadily growing, and you are racing
against time to fix it. This could either be memory growth due to a misconfig,
or a memory leak due to a software bug. For some applications, performance can
begin to degrade as garbage collection works harder, consuming CPU. If an
application grows too large, performance can drop off a cliff due to paging
(swapping), or the application may be killed by the system (OOM killer). You
want to take a quick look before either occurs, in case it’s an easy fix. But
how?

Less known Solaris 11.1 features: Auditing pfedit usage

You have allowed junior to edit the httpd.conf and and some nice evening,
you are sitting at home. Then: You get alerts on your mobile: Webserver down.
You log into the server. You check the httpd.conf. You see an error. You
correct it. You look into the change log. Nothing. You ask your colleagues, who
made this change. Nobody. Dang. As always. Classic "Whodunit".

segkp revisited

When you are runing quite a number of zones and running applications with a
lot of threads and your system sends you messages like "cannot fork: Resource
temporarily unavailable" in all your zones in parallel and you are not running
Solaris 11.1, you should do the following checks. The following checks are for
a system without any changes in this regard of segkp in the /etc/system. The
numbers used in this example are obfuscated by rounding from a real-life
example.

Solaris 11 has been out on the market for nigh on two years and it's an
absolutely brilliant evolution in the history of Solaris, however I've come to
notice one common issue that really shouldn't be an issue at all: the number of
calls we're getting from people not being able to interpret the failure
messages that pkg(1M) produces.

This post aims to explain how to interpret, understand and resolve the most
common pkg(1M) errors.

Less known Solaris 11.1 features: A user in 1024 groups and a workaround
for a 25 year old problem

For a long time the maximum number of groups a user could belong to was 16,
albeit there was a way to get 32. In Solaris 11 and recent versions of Solaris
10, the maximum number of groups a user could belong to is 1024 (which is the
same limit Windows sets in this regard). It's easy to set the new limit.

Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance

There has been major news on the Oracle virtualization front with the
announcement of the Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance ("OVCA" for short). This
is an Oracle engineered system designed for virtualization, joining Oracle's
family of engineered systems such as Exadata, Exalogic, and Oracle SuperCluster
T5-8.

OVCA is is intended for general purpose use for a wide range of applications
in virtual machines rather than being optimized for a specific workload. It is
especially designed for quick deployment into production and ease of use.
Customers can start up virtual machines about an hour after OVCA installation.
That provides faster "time to value" than taking general purpose systems and
designing, adding, and configuring the network, storage and VM software needed
to be useful.

So, what makes Solaris Zones so cool?

How do you virtualize? Do you emulate virtual machines? Do you partition
your servers' hardware? Or do you run a container technology?

This post is about the third option, a container technology built right into
Solaris: Solaris Zones. They are pretty awesome, especially on Solaris 11 -
they're like vacation: once you go Zones, you won't want to leave them :) But
what exactly makes Zones so cool?

Less^H^H^H^HUnknown features of Solaris 11: Virtual Consoles

Next time you are working on the console of your system (perhaps just the
console you see in Virtualbox), just try pressing the alt-Key and the cursor
left or cursor right key in parallel respectively Alt+F1 for the first, the
system console. Alt+F2 for the second console ... and so on. Nothing
innovative, especially as Solaris used to have them in the past (but lost them
out of reasons unknown to me) ... more a feature from the "Damned! At
last!"-department, but still really useful.

Oracle revs up Sparc M6 chip for seriously big iron

Hot Chips The new Sparc M6 processor, unveiled at the Hot Chips conference
at Stanford University this week, makes a bold statement about Oracle's intent
to invest in very serious big iron and go after Big Blue in a big way.

Oracle's move is something that the systems market desperately needs,
particularly for customers where large main memory is absolutely necessary. And
– good news for Ellison & CO. – with every passing day, big memory
computing is getting to be more and more important, just like in the glory days
of the RISC/Unix business.

Oracle software will run faster with new SPARC M6 chip

Oracle's database and high-performance workloads will run faster with the
company's latest SPARC M6 chip, which has been tuned specially for the
company's applications.

The latest SPARC processor has 12 processor cores, effectively doubling the
number of cores than its predecessor, M5, which shipped earlier this year. Each
M6 core will be able to run 8 threads simultaneously, giving the chip the
ability to run 96 threads simultaneously, said Ali Vahidsafa , senior hardware
engineer at Oracle, during a presentation about M6 at the Hot Chips conference
in Stanford, California.

How to Get Started Using DTrace on Oracle Linux

We all hate slow code. Bunch of princesses is what we've become. During the
American Civil War, they had to deliver their text messages by horseback! It
took weeks! And half the time, they got blown off their horse by a cannonball
to the neck!

Today? Today we have to have our stuff back in milliseconds, or we start
tweeting about it. So, if you're developing or deploying applications, how do
you keep them performing at the speed to which we have become accustomed?
DTrace, of course.

I got asked these questions recently and had to go look the subject up ...
again! I seem to have forgotten some of the details and then I thought I would
use some new features of AIX for the second part. In the distant past there was
various way to stop core files being dumped in to the current working directory
of the program that failed. In AIX 5.3, AIX 6 and 7, the "chcore" command does
all the hard work for us by letting us...

Availability Best Practices on Oracle VM Server for SPARC

This is the first of a series of blog posts on configuring Oracle VM Server
for SPARC (also called Logical Domains) for availability. This series will show
how to how to plan for availability, improve serviceability, avoid single
points of failure, and provide resiliency against hardware and software
failures.

How Oracle Solaris Makes Oracle Database Fast

Is choosing an operating system all that's important any more? After all,
virtualization lets sysadmins choose the OS that best matches the workload they
plan to put on each virtual machine. And Red Hat Linux on Intel is cheap and
ubiquitous enough to work for most anything. Right?

We don't think so.

National Security, the "two man rule" and Solaris

[...] Luckily, Solaris 10 and 11 have all the tools to assist in creating a
"two man rule." In fact, we published a paper on the topic in 2005. Its
comprehensive role and profile based collection of authorizations ensure that
only user with the proper authorizations are allowed access to administrative
tools. Solaris can be configured so that one user has the role of "Security
Admin" while another user has the role of "System Admin."

How to Install Oracle 12c RAC: a Step-by-Step Guide

Okay, back to school folks, back to school :). As with any new product, our
long learning journey starts with an installation on a sandbox environment. To
get you up to speed with Oracle 12c RAC and let you focus on important stuff
(e.g. features research), I have put together detailed step-by-step
installation instructions.

Overview of Linux Kernel Security Features

In this article, we'll take a high-level look at the security features of
the Linux kernel. We'll start with a brief overview of traditional Unix
security, and the rationale for extending that for Linux, then we'll discuss
the Linux security extensions.

Availability Best Practices - Availability Using Multiple Service
Domains

Oracle VM Server for SPARC lets the administrator create multiple service
domains to provide virtual I/O devices to guests. While not mandatory, this
powerful feature adds resiliency and reduces single points of failure.
Resiliency is provided by redundant I/O devices, strengthened by providing the
I/O from different service domains.

Availability Best Practices - Example configuring a T5-8

This article continues the series on availability best practices. In this
post we will show each step used to configure a T5-8 for availability with
redundant network and disk I/O, using multiple service domains.

Power Ask the Experts Technical Event UK - Session Downloads

The fifth POWER Ask the Experts is a one day customer technical event in the
UK which ran in Manchester and London on 15th/16th July 2013. It proved to be a
very popular free event. We had well over a 100 people attend which was a
mixture of customers, a few Business partners and some IBMers.

Top 5 Processor Myths

When the microprocessor was invented in 1974, the computational power packed
into the 2.6-GHz, dual-core Intel Core i5 that’s in the laptop I got when I
joined Oracle two weeks ago would have been unimaginable.

The Ksplice differentiator

It's been exactly two years since we acquired a small startup called
Ksplice. Ksplice as a company created the zero downtime update technology for
the Linux kernel and they provided a service to their customers which tracked
Linux kernel security fixes and providing these fixes as zero downtime Ksplice
updates.

Using ndisk64 to test new disk set-ups like Flash Systems

This is a typical request from IBMers in services or direct from customers
wanting to confirm a good disk setup or confirm disks deliver as promised. This
time "... a test of SAN disk performance where LUN's are carved from a IBM
Flash System 820 with SVC. Primary objective is to show the IBM Flash System
820 can do hundreds of thousands IOPS with response time <1ms with good
throughput. This is for an Oracle RDBMS using ASM".

Instant Automated Installer Zone for Oracle Solaris 11.1

We've just introduced something new to make it easier to start working with
AI, so you can get past that "different" part and start reaping the (major)
benefits. The name's kinda long: Oracle Solaris Zone with Automated Installer
and Repository... but that's because there's a lot it's doing for you in one
shot. As the name implies, it sets up a new zone on your system, with a local
Oracle Solaris 11.1 package repository for both SPARC and x86 deployments, and
a DHCP server which you can optionally turn on, configured to act as an AI
server. It's pretty much "install and go" and you can immediately start to
explore the extensive feature set of AI.

Linux Performance Analysis and Tools

At the Southern California Linux Expo earlier this year (SCaLE 11x) I
presented a talk on Linux Performance Analysis and Tools. It’s a great
conference, and I was happy to be back.

My talk provided an overview of over twenty performance tools, and I
described the problems they solve. At the end of the talk, I summarized some
methodologies for using these tools, so that you know when to reach for
what.

A closer look at the new T5 TPC-H result

You've probably all seen the new TPC-H benchmark result for the SPARC T5-4
submitted to TPC on June 7. Our benchmark guys over at "BestPerf" have already
pointed out the major takeaways from the result. However, I believe there's
more to make note of.

Moving Oracle Solaris 11 Zones between physical servers

As part of my job in the ISV Engineering team, I am often asked by partners
the following question : is it possible to easily move a Solaris 11 Zone from a
physical server to another? The short answer is : YES !

Comparing Solaris 11 Zones to Solaris 10 Zones

Many people have asked whether Oracle Solaris 11 uses sparse-root zones or
whole-root zones. I think the best answer is "both and neither, and more" - but
that's a wee bit confusing. This blog entry attempts to explain that
answer.

Best Practices - Live Migration on Oracle VM Server for SPARC

Oracle VM Server for SPARC has supported live migration since 2011,
providing operational flexibility for customers who need to move a running
guest domain between servers. This can be extremely useful, but there's
confusion about when it is the right tool to use, when it isn't, and how to
best make use of it. This article will discuss some best practices and "do's
and don'ts" for live migration.

Frequency Trails

Frequency trails are a simple and intuitive visualization of the
distribution of sampled data. I developed them to study the finer details of
hundreds of measured latency distributions from production servers, and in
particular, to study latency outliers.

Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud

Systems performance analysis is an important skill for all computer users,
whether you’re trying to understand why your laptop is slow, or optimizing the
performance of a large-scale production environment. It is the study of both
operating system (kernel) and application performance, but can also lead to
more specialized performance topics, for specific languages or applications.
Systems performance is covered in my upcoming book: Systems Performance:
Enterprise and the Cloud, to be published by Prentice Hall this year.

Hello, Manta: Bringing Unix to Big Data

Joyent Manta is a highly scalable, distributed object storage service with
integrated compute. Developers can store and process any amount of data at any
time where a simple web API call replaces the need for spinning up instances.
Joyent Manta Compute is a complete and high performance compute environment
including R, Python, node.js, Perl, Ruby, Java, C/C++, ffmpeg, grep, awk and
others. Metering is by the second with zero provisioning, data movement or
scheduling latency costs.

The death of disks

A forecast says PC shipments with disk drives will drop by a third between
now and 2017. IBM is pushing the all-flash datacenter. SSD start ups are
claiming that flash is really as cheap as disk with much better performance. Is
it the beginning of the end for disk drives?

Manta: Unix Meets Map Reduce

Today Joyent launched Manta: an object store built upon ZFS and Zones, the
SmartOS platform, and with a familiar Unix interface as the API. This supports
compute jobs such as map reduce, and provides high performance by co-locating
zones with the object storage. We also have extensive DTrace instrumentation
throughout the product, which we’ve been using in development to help tune
performance and respond to performance issues.

Linux-Containers — Part 1: Overview

Linux Containers (LXC) provide a means to isolate individual services or
applications as well as of a complete Linux operating system from other
services running on the same host. To accomplish this, each container gets its
own directory structure, network devices, IP addresses and process table. The
processes running in other containers or the host system are not visible from
inside a container. Additionally, Linux Containers allow for fine granular
control of resources like RAM, CPU or disk I/O.

Oracle 12c: First (and best!) on Solaris

Oracle 12c is now available for download. Notice that support for Solaris
SPARC and x86-64 are among the operating systems supported on the first day of
availability. [...] As has been the case for some time, Oracle databases are
supported in zones.

New White Paper about Upgrade to Oracle Database 12c

This white paper outlines the methods available for you to upgrade and
migrate your database to Oracle Database 12c. Learn about different use cases
and key factors to consider when choosing the method that best fits your
requirements.

Improving Manageability of Virtual Environments

Until recently, Solaris 10 Branded Zones on Solaris 11 suffered one notable
regression: Live Upgrade did not work. The individual packaging and patching
tools work correctly, but the ability to upgrade Solaris while the production
workload continued running did not exist. A recent Solaris 11 SRU (Solaris 11.1
SRU 6.4) restored most of that functionality, although with a slightly
different concept, different commands, and without all of the feature details.
This new method gives you the ability to create and manage multiple boot
environments (BEs) for a Solaris 10 Branded Zone, and modify the active or any
inactive BE, and to do so while the production workload continues to run.

The half-rack configuration of the Sparc SuperCluster populates each node
with four of its eight Sparc T5 chips plus 1TB of main memory, eight 900GB disk
drives spinning at 10K RPM, four 40Gb/sec InfiniBand ports and four 10GB/sec
Ethernet ports. The InfiniBand ports are used to link the two server nodes to
each other in an Oracle RAC cluster and to the Exadata storage servers that are
also in the rack. Across those two nodes, you have 128 cores and 2TB of
memory.

Oracle Database 12c: Finally, a True Cloud Database

In development for roughly four years, Oracle Database 12c introduces so
many important new capabilities in so many areas -- database consolidation,
query optimization, performance tuning, high availability, partitioning, backup
and recovery -- that even a lengthy review has to cut corners. Nevertheless, in
addition to covering the big ticket items, I'll give a number of the lesser
enhancements their due.

How to Monitor Systems in Enterprise Manager using Ops Center

In this post, we'll use Ops Center to add hardware monitoring to Enterprise
Manager. We'll discuss the existing capabilities of Host targets, show how to
create an Infrastructure Stack and demonstrate some of the features it provides
to Enterprise Manager.

The Clipper Group Navigator

The Clipper Group Navigator, first published in 1993, describes new
technologies and innovative products and the business values that they bring to
the enterprise. It is targeted at business readers, in general, and decision
makers in the information technology community, in particular.

IBM Extends the Reach of POWER7+ - Introducing POWER7+ Servers for the Rest
of Us (February 5, 2013)

Why SysAdmin’s Can’t Code

Most systems administrators are quick, perhaps too quick, to tell you “I’m
not a coder.” Oddly, this admission normally comes after boasting about how
many programming languages they know or have used. Why is this? Can this be
changed? Here is my 5 step plan on how any SA can become an honest to goodness
programmer.

P2V in Ops Center

You can do P2V using Ops Center, but it's not a single-wizard process, and
it'll take a bit of tinkering. Basically, you take a flash archive (FLAR) of an
existing system, import it, then deploy a host, ldom, or branded zone based on
that FLAR.

What is NPIV (N_Port ID Virtualization) and NPV (N_Port
Virtualization)?

How to go Physical to Virtual with Oracle Solaris Zones using Enterprise
Manager Ops Center

Many customers have large collections of physical Solaris 8, 9 and 10
servers in their datacenters and they are wondering how they are going to
virtualize them. This leads to a commonly asked question. Can Enterprise
Manager Ops Center 12C be used to P2V (Physical to Virtual) my old servers? Ops
Center does not have a single button P2V capability, but it is possible for Ops
Center to deploy physical servers, LDOMs and branded zones based on flash
archives(flars) that have been taken of your existing physical servers. Ops
Center achieves P2V by deploying flars and leveraging its patching and
automation capabilities, to make the P2V process consistent, repeatable and as
cost effective as possible.

Why OS matters: Solaris Users Group testimony

Wednesday evening, a month after the new SPARC servers T5 & M5 launch in
Paris, the french Solaris users group, get together to get the latest from
Oracle experts on SPARC T5 & M5, Oracle Virtual Network, as well as the new
enhancements inside Solaris 11.1 for Oracle Database. They also came to share
their projects experiences and lessons learn, leveraging Solaris features :
René Garcia Vallina from PSA, did a deep dive on ZFS internal and best
practices around SAP deployment and Bruno Philippe explained how he managed to
consolidate 100 Solaris servers into 6 thanks to Solaris 11 specific
features.

Entitlements and VPs—Why You Should Care

With the POWER7 processor, many changes were integrated into the chip that
must be taken into account when defining LPARs. First, understand that POWER7
technology and simultaneous multithreading (SMT4) are all about throughput, and
rPerf is a throughput-based performance measurement. Therefore, to take
advantage of the server’s full rPerf it’s important to drive all of the
threads. However, the way the threads get kicked off has changed with
POWER7.

Revealing Hidden Latency Patterns

Response time – or latency – is crucial to understand in detail, but many of
the common presentations of this data hide important details and patterns.
Latency heat maps are an effective way to reveal these. I often use tools that
provide heat maps directly, but sometimes I have separate trace output that I’d
like to convert into a heat map. To answer this need, I just wrote
trace2heatmap.pl, which generates interactive SVGs.

NSS_OPTIONS

Sometimes developers put undocumented options in their code to help with
debugging issues. This morning I came across one of such options which prints
extra debug information when executing NSS queries.

Oracle Solaris 11 Certification Study Tips

Today on UnixEd.com, author and educator Bill Calkins posts some tips for
taking Oracle Solaris 11 certification exams. In this helpful article, he
outlines key things to focus on for the most effective use of your study time,
including type of exam questions, recommended practice exercises, how to
approach and interpret scenarios, as well as recommended reading/study material
within his new book, "Oracle Solaris 11 System Administration" which comes out
in Jun 2013.

Permissive and Restricted Policies

Recently I posted two entries about the new Extended Policy functionality in
Oracle Solaris 11.1. One demonstrated how to create application sandboxes, and
the other how to confine services, like MySQL. Both of these are examples of
restrictive policies, whereas privileges have traditionally been used to
implement permissive policies, hence the term privilege escalation. The basic
functionality and terminology first appeared in Trusted Solaris in 1991.
Unfortunately, a draft of the POSIX 1.e Security Specification (withdrawn),
used the term capabilities for this functionality, which was subsequently used
by Linux developers. Oracle Solaris privileges do share some common terminology
with Linux, including the permitted, effective, and inheritable privilege sets.
But almost everything else is different.

Midrange Power7+ Servers: The More Oomph You Want, The More It Costs

In last week's issue of The Four Hundred, I walked you though the pricing
for various sized configurations of the new Power 750+ and Power 760+ midrange
servers using IBM's dual-chip module (DCM) variant of the Power7+ processor.
That just looked at the system hardware costs. This week, as I have done in the
past, I want to walk you through how the raw computing, operating system, and
Software Maintenance costs compare across each processor SKU and how those
costs stack up with prior Power 750 machines.

Ksplice Inspector

With so many kernel updates released, it can be difficult to keep track. At
Oracle, we monitor kernels on a daily basis and provide bug and security
updates administrators can apply without a system reboot. To help out, the
Ksplice team at Oracle has produced the Ksplice Inspector, a web tool to show
you the updates Ksplice can apply to your kernel with zero downtime.

Oracle Solaris and SPARC Performance, Part 1

To start with: we've just released an update to Oracle Solaris Studio, with
compiler optimizations specifically designed to get the most performance out of
applications on Oracle T5, Oracle M5, and Fujitsu M10 systems.

For Big Data Customers, Top Performance Means High Speed And Low Cost

I hate to quibble with the general manager of IBM’s Power systems division,
but his argument that systems speed and power are no longer top priorities for
businesses is, to use his own words, “not at all in tune with the market
today.”
[...]
As a result, IBM is trying to shift the terms of the debate in order to buy
itself some time so that it can try to come up with some sort of story that
might blunt the simple facts that Oracle’s new T5 servers have not only posted
benchmark results several times faster than comparable IBM products, but are
much less expensive as well.

Deploying an application in Solaris 11

Glynn takes his time to provide a thorough explanation to anyone who might
be entering the world of Solaris 11 and is interested in seeing how things can
be put together. Glynn goes over IPS components such as actuators, facets,
variants, mediators, a family of pkg* commands, reviews SMF elements such as
manifests, profiles, and svcbundle, as well as ties everything into building a
zone and performing basic resource management on how the zone consumes network
bandwidth.

Oracle VM Templates now available on SPARC platforms

Oracle VM Templates provide an innovative approach to deploying a fully
configured software stack by offering pre-installed and pre-configured software
images. Use of Oracle VM Templates eliminates the installation and
configuration costs, and reduces the ongoing maintenance costs helping
organizations achieve faster time to market and lower cost of operations.
Customers have been enjoying the benefits of accelerating software deployment
with Oracle VM Templates on x86 platforms. Now we have made Oracle VM Templates
available when deployed with Oracle VM Server for SPARC.

Massive Solaris Scalability for the T5-8 and M5-32, Part 1

How do you scale a general purpose operating system to handle a single
system image with 1000's of CPUs and 10's of terabytes of memory? You start
with the scalable Solaris foundation. You use superior tools such as Dtrace to
expose issues, quantify them, and extrapolate to the future. You pay careful
attention to computer science, data structures, and algorithms, when designing
fixes. You implement fixes that automatically scale with system size, so that
once exposed, an issue never recurs in future systems, and the set of issues
you must fix in each larger generation steadily shrinks.

Massive Solaris Scalability for the T5-8 and M5-32, Part 2

Last time, I outlined the general issues that must be addressed to achieve
operating system scalability. Next I will provide more detail on what we
modified in Solaris to reach the M5-32 scalability level. We worked in most of
the major areas of Solaris, including Virtual Memory, Resources, Scheduler,
Devices, Tools, and Reboot. Today I cover VM and resources.

Oracle Solaris and SPARC (and x86) Performance, Part 4

Simply speaking, east/west traffic is the traffic that rather than going in
and out of the data center (which in the world of this metaphor is called
north/south traffic), goes between servers in the same data center -- or even
in the same physical server.

Sizing with rPerf but Don't Forget the Assumptions

POWER Relative Performance (rPerf) is often used as a way to approximate the
expected difference in performance between two Power Systems servers. Although
rPerf is a useful tool, it is important to understand the limitations of using
rPerf to provide an estimate the performance of your specific workloads in your
particular environment with a new server.

DoD customer receives authority to operate SparcSupercluster

Recently, one of our good U.S. DoD customers purchased a SPARC SuperCluster
system and received their "Interim Authority to Operate" on the DoD network.
Why is this a big deal? First, allow me provide an overview of the SPARC
SuperCluster system.

Oracle Launches T5 and M5 Servers: A New Generation of Oracle's
SPARC/Solaris Servers

For longtime Sun customers, the technology refresh will be welcome, leading
to improved SPARC server sales right away. But Oracle can be expected to look
far beyond its own installed base, planning to grow its total available market
(TAM) by taking share from its longtime Unix competitors, IBM and HP. Now that
the new T5 and M5 technology is ready, IDC will watch with great interest in
coming quarters to see whether the T5 and M5 announcements will lead to
near-term market share gain and to a long-awaited turnaround in Oracle's
hardware business.

Understanding I/O: Random vs Sequential

I have another article planned for later in this series which describes the
inescapable mechanics of disk. For now though, I’ll outline the basics: every
time you need to access a block on a disk drive, the disk actuator arm has to
move the head to the correct track (the seek time), then the disk platter has
to rotate to locate the correct sector (the rotational latency). This
mechanical action takes time, just like the sushi travelling around the
conveyor belt.

A File System All Its Own

In the past five years, flash memory has progressed from a promising
accelerator, whose place in the data center was still uncertain, to an
established enterprise component for storing performance-critical data. It's
rise to prominence followed its proliferation in the consumer world and the
volume economics that followed. With SSDs (solid-state devices), flash arrived
in a form optimized for compatibility—just replace a hard drive with an SSD for
radically better performance. But the properties of the NAND flash memory used
by SSDs differ significantly from those of the magnetic media in the hard
drives they often displace. While SSDs have become more pervasive in a variety
of uses, the industry has only just started to design storage systems that
embrace the nuances of flash memory. As it escapes the confines of
compatibility, significant improvements in performance, reliability, and cost
are possible.

What is the best platform to run your Oracle Database on?

As a Systems Consultant I am often faced with the following question: What
does Oracle recommend as the best platform to run the Oracle DB in large
enterprise environments on? Is the Exadata DB Machine the recommended platform?
Are SPARC/Solaris servers the way to go? Or should customers consolidate on
SPARC SuperCluster setups?

ZFS Analytics

While working with ZFS performance I created a dashboard to get a good
overview with lots of different statistics. It's powered by Dtrace, python and
graphite. There is a high level of detail but still easy to correlate different
statistics.

Oracle Solaris 11 and PCI DSS Compliance

This paper provides guidance to IT professionals who are implementing Oracle
Solaris 11 within their Cardholder Data Environment (CDE) and to the Qualified
Security Assessor (QSA) assessing those environments. The Payment Card Industry
Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) applies to all organizations that store,
process, or transmit cardholder data. This includes entities such as merchants,
service providers, payment gateways, data centers, and outsourced service
providers.

Oracle have announced new systems based on the new T5 and M5 processors
(thank you Henkis, from It's a UNIX system!, for the following short resume):

T5 16 cores @ 3.6GHz 8MB L3$ 1-8 socket systems PCIe 3.0

M5 6 cores @ 3.6GHz 48MB L3$ 32 socket system PCIe 3.0

The T5 has doubled the number of S3 cores from the T4 and increased the
clock frequency to 3.6GHz.

The M5 processor is also based on the S3 core (rebranded M4) clocked at
3.6Ghz but is has 6 cores and 48MB L3$. The M systems supports up to 32 M5
processor so a fully configured systems will have 192 cores and 1536 strands
(hardware threads). The M5-32 have 32TB of memory in a single system.

Example of a SPARC T5 configuration:

8 CPU x 16 cores x 8 compute threads = 1024 vCPU

4TB of RAM

8 x 600GB = 4.8TB (10KRPM SAS)

4 x 10GbE

8 RU (Rack Unit)

Support Oracle Solaris 10 and Solaris 11

Logical Domains (up to 128 by chassis), and Zones (8192 per OS
instance)

Public list price: 626,000$

Example of a SPARC M5 configuration:

32 CPU x 6 cores x 8 compute threads = 1536 vCPU

32TB of RAM

Support Oracle Solaris 10 and Solaris 11

Dynamic Domains (up to 4 by chassis), Logical Domains (up to 512 by
chassis), and Zones (8192 per OS instance)

Public list price: nothing public ;)

All new systems both T5 and M5 supports LDOM (Oracle VM for SPARC), plus the
old Dynamic Domain technology for the M5. The M5 gets an ILOM as Service
Processor (as for T5 and the x86 server lines), exit the legacy XSCF.

Oracle's new T5 Sparcs boost scalability in chip and chassis

Oracle is launching its much-awaited Sparc T5 processors for entry and
midrange servers, along with Sparc M5 processors to effectively replace the
iron it currently resells from server and chip partner Fujitsu.

The T5-8 maxxes out at 128 cores, 1,024 threads, and 4TB of memory [...]

At the moment, Oracle is shipping only one box based on the Sparc M5, with
32 sockets, called the Sparc M5-32 (obviously). Fully configured, this big-iron
box weighs in at 192 cores, 1,536 threads, and 32TB of main memory. No one has
as much memory in a single image today – not IBM, not Silicon Graphics, not HP,
and not Fujitsu.

"These machines deliver better integer performance than the IBM Power
series," proclaimed Ellison. "The T5 microprocessor itself delivers better
integer performance than IBM's PowerPC chip. Now that is really extraordinary,
because IBM has had that lead for a very, very long time for integer rate
performance, but that lead now moves over from IBM Power to Sparc T5.

"A lot of people are surprised by this," continued Ellison. "When Oracle
bought Sun, a lot of people thought the Sparc microprocessor was a real
laggard. There were a lot of people who believed that we would never catch up.
Well, we have done better than catch up. We caught up, and then we passed the
competition. We passed x86 and we passed IBM Power."

Boom!

So that's quite a "boom." With the launch of the new SPARC T5 and M5 series
of servers, we've set over a dozen new performance records, and shown that back
in 2010 Oracle did indeed establish a SPARC roadmap that it could execute
on.

Hot Chips 24: SPARC T5 Overview

Every year, the best of engineering talent comes together in academia for
Hot Chips conference, to present the best system designs. During Hot Chips 24,
Session 9 - the SPARC T5 was presented by Sebastian Turullols and Ram
Sivaramakrishnan from Oracle on Wednesday, August 29, 2012. This processor was
released 6 months later, by Oracle with their T5 systems on Tuesday March 26,
2013.

SPARC T5 System Performance for Encryption Microbenchmark

The cryptography benchmark suite was internally developed by Oracle to
measure the maximum throughput of in-memory, on-chip encryption operations that
a system can perform. Multiple threads are used to achieve the maximum
throughput. Systems powered by Oracle's SPARC T5 processor show outstanding
performance on the tested encryption operations, beating Intel processor based
systems.

Implementing Root Domains with Oracle VM Server for SPARC

This paper describes how to implement an increasingly useful type of
virtualization feature known as root domains. It also describes an operational
model where root domains can be used in conjunction with Solaris Zones for
maximum performance and a high degree of flexibility.

Oracle Magazine: SPARC at 25

The SPARC architecture is perhaps the first and longest lasting open and
mainstram computing architecture in human history. In Ocrober 2012, Network
Management published a reminder for people to attend the "SPARC at 25" event at
the Computer History Museum. In November of 2012, Network Management published
an short article pointing to the replay of the historic events: SPARC at 25:
Past, Present, and Future. Diana Reichardt published an article "SPARC at 25"
in the bi-monthly printed Oracle Magazine, covering the event.

New Tab: OpenSXCE New Distribution!

OpenSolaris grew from an Open Source repository to Open Solaris Distribution
(for both Intel and SPARC.) Solaris Express Community Edition (Solaris SXCE)
was the Intel/SPARC forerunner of Oracle Solaris 11, which abandoned UltraSPARC
processors. OpenSXCE, based upon the work of MarTUX, brings OpenIndiana and
Illumos back to SPARC as a full distribution, based upon standards such as SVR4
packaging.

Encapsulating Oracle Databases with Oracle Solaris 11 Zones

Implementing higher degrees of isolation can be accomplished by
encapsulating each database environment. Encapsulation can be accomplished with
physical or logical isolation techniques. Oracle recently certified 11gR2 RAC
in Solaris 11 Zones, which is an important capability for database clouds,
because it enables strong isolation between databases consolidated together on
a shared hardware and O/S infrastructure.

Improve Your Hardware Support Experience

Oracle Hardware customers who are running Oracle Solaris or Oracle Solaris
x86, can improve their support experience. Oracle Support recommends these
three Hardware Essentials to all Oracle Hardware customers:

Download and install the Services Tools Bundle.

Set up Oracle Explorer.

Enable Automatic Service Request (ASR).

Console logging in Oracle VM Server for SPARC

A new feature in Oracle VM Server for SPARC provides logging for guest
domain consoles. Console I/O - all text on the serial console - is logged for
all or selected domains, including text that appears before the domain boots
Solaris. Logs are stored in files under the directory /var/log/vntsd/domain.
These directories are root-owned to protect them from unauthorized access.

ZFS Write Performance (Impact of fragmentation)

In the past few months, George Wilson and Adam Leventhal made significant
improvements to how writes are handled in ZFS. In this multi part blog post, I
will talk about a benchmark we created to measure improvements in ZFS write
performance as we make changes to the OS. In this post, I will talk about the
benchmark setup and run. I will show some of the results from this benchmark on
Delphix OS. In part two, I will present data and some analysis on the
bottlenecks discovered and how they are going to be addressed.

Announcing Oracle Solaris Cluster 3.3 3/13

Today we released Oracle Solaris Cluster 3.3 3/13 (that's a lot of threes!).
This update is specifically for use with Oracle Solaris 10, delivering even
more high availability and disaster recovery capabilities for mission-critical
application deployments.

Welcome to the mainline Linux kernel blog

I'd like to welcome everyone to this new blog, where I'll be discussing
what's happening with the Oracle mainline Linux kernel development team. I'm
James Morris, manager of the team. I report to Wim Coekaerts. I'm also the
maintainer of the Linux kernel security subsystem, which I blog about
separately here.

OpenAFS on Solaris 11 x86 - Robert Milkowski

The March Solaris SIG event is about running OpenAFS on Solaris 11 x86. This
talk will explore what makes Solaris unique in large OpenAFS deployments with
petabytes of storage - how it can save millions of dollars and make debugging
and performance analysis much easier and quicker compared to other platforms.
Some of the unique features of OpenAFS will be described and how we used them
to migrate one of the largest OpenAFS deployments in the world - completely
on-line and transparently to AFS clients. Real world examples of how DTrace was
used to improve OpenAFS performance and scalability will be discussed.

I have had a couple of Power systems administrators make assumptions about
the virtual Ethernet speed improvements when they install a 10 Gb IVE/HEA in a
VIOS which are simply not true. I guess that if three teams have made this
mistake then others are about too. So I intend here to put the record
straight.

a few words about EtherChannel

Originally, this technology was meant to protect a host against a failure of
its network adapter and/or switch (network switch). Additionally, some
unscrupulous salesmen claimed a fantastic increase in throughput aka two
adapters tied together will double, three adapters tied together will triple
throughput of the associated with them EtherChannel adapter – yes, in a
salesman pure land of fantasy.

Less known Solaris Features: Highly available loadbalancing

As you may know, Solaris contains an integrated load balancer. It's really
easy to configure. Not that well known is the point, that you can make it
higly-available in an easy way as well. The following tutorial will give you an
overview on the configuration of this feature.

One of the features introduced with 11.1 is the Address Space Layout
Randomization (ASLR) . And when you work with 11.1 you are already using it. So
it's a less known, but frequently used feature: less known in the point that it
exists, less known in the point of the methods to control it, frequently used
as it's activated per default for selected binaries (and many were
selected).

How to Use an Existing Oracle Solaris 10 JumpStart Server to Provision
Oracle Solaris 11 11/11

This article illustrates how to take an existing JumpStart server, install
the Oracle Solaris 11 Provisioning Assistant for Oracle Solaris 10 on it,
create and configure an installation service, and then provision a client
system using that installation service.

Everyone knows that one of the major problem for consolidating Solaris 10 is
network. if each Solaris Zones use a different network (vlan), the
configuration of the Global Zone becomes a real headache.

No, ZFS still doesn't need a fsck. Really!

Friday was a day that i called once 10k day. More 10.000 visitors to my blog
in one day. Saturday was similar. This surge was create by an link on
news.ycombinator.com article i wrote roughly four years ago about ZFS: No, ZFS
really doesn't need a fsck.

Just wanted to express that four years later and a lot more experience with
ZFS later, 12 years after ZFS saw the light of the word, i'm more of the
opinion that ZFS doesn't need a fsck than ever.

Network Virtualization and Network Resource Management

After discussing Oracle VM, OS virtualization, and some aspects of resource
management in the previous articles of this series, this article will now cover
a special area of resource management and virtualization of resources: network
virtualization and network resource management.

The network is a special shared resource that glues all the virtual machines
(VMs), zones, and systems together and provides a communication channel with
the world. Thus, the network is a very important layer of the virtualization
stack.

Oracle: Solaris 10 Update 11 Released!

Solaris 10 was launched in 2005, with ground-breaking features like: DTrace,
SMF (Services), Zones, LDom's, and later ZFS. The latest, and perhaps last,
update of Solaris 10 was expected in 2012, to co-inside with an early release
of the SPARC T5. In 2013, Oracle released yet another update, suggesting the T5
is close to release. The latest installment of Solaris 10 is referred to as
01/13 release, for January 2013, appears to be the final SVR4 Solaris release,
with expected normal Oracle support extending to 2018. Many serious
administrators will refer to this release as Solaris 10 Update 11.

IBM Announces updated Power710 to 740 and brand new Power 750/760

This time it was very different as looking at the POWER7+ Power 750/760 s we
thought: "Hang on!! We have seen this before! It looks just like a Power770 but
one U taller (5U instead of 4U)." So it is a completely different machine
inside - if it was not for the 32 CPU cores in the Power 750 model and so fits
in the uprated range in the same place, it should have been given new number. I
guess using the same number means we all know where it fits. The 760 is very
much the same machine but with all the higher features as the 750 but you can't
convert between them.

Best Practices - Top Ten Tuning Tips

Oracle VM Server for SPARC is a high performance virtualization technology
for SPARC servers. It provides native CPU performance without the
virtualization overhead typical of hypervisors. The way memory and CPU
resources are assigned to domains avoids problems often seen in other virtual
machine environments, and there are intentionally few "tuning knobs" to
adjust.

However, there are best practices that can enhance or ensure performance.
This blog post lists and briefly explains performance tips and best practices
that should be used in most environments.

Oracle VM Manager used with SPARC - demo

Rather than describe this in text, the best thing to do is show it in demo
format. Fortunately, the wizardly Steen Schmidt has produced outstanding
Youtube videos showing Oracle VM Manager in action at https://www.youtube.com/user/gandalf3100.

Linux YAMA Security equivalents in Solaris

The Linux YAMA Loadable Security Module (LSM) provides a small number of
protections over and above standard DAC (Discretionary Access Controls). These
can be roughly mapped over to Solaris as follows...

Itanium: Another Step Closer to Death

Intel had produced the Itanium architecture to compete in the higher-end 64
bit arena and eventually sun-set their aging 32 bit x64 architecture. With the
release of AMD's x64 architecture, and vendors such as Sun Microsystems
abandoning the Itanium roadmap for AMD x64 - pressure was placed upon Intel to
include 64 bit instructions in the x86 chipset. Now with Intel x86 supporting
64 bit processing, there is little reason for Itanium to exist, placing
pressure on remaining Itanum system vendors.

How to Update A Linux Kernel Without Rebooting

The uptrack-update command applies patches to your Linux kernel while your
system is still running. A Ksplice Uptrack subscription gets you so much more
than rebootless kernel updates. Here are some details.

How to Configure the Linux Out-of-Memory Killer

This article describes the Linux out-of-memory (OOM) killer and how to find
out why it killed a particular process. It also provides methods for
configuring the OOM killer to better suit the needs of many different
environments.